I recently upgraded my computer to a Win 7 Ultimate (64 bit) machine. I installed my old EM 2 SP2 and it seemed to run OK, except I'm not seeing CR2, PSD or PSB files at all. I'm not sure what other files are not there so far, but I can see jpeg's and tiff's. From looking at the forum, others seem to be using Win 7 and EM2 fine. I contacted Phase One and got the following information:

"You should know that Expression Media 2 is not supported on windows 7Reason for the files is not showing up is that there is no codec to read the files and the software is not compatible with the operating system to gain access to thumbnaiuls."

This doesn't sound right to me, although I suppose I need to find some codecs. Are some of you using EM2 SP2 with Win7 64 bit successfully? Where do I get these codecs? Should I "upgrade" to Media Pro (I would like to have the catalog sets feature, as my library is getting too big for a single Lightroom 2.7 catalog.) However, Lightroom is still my preferred approach for the rest of my workflow.

I run iView Media Pro 3 on my Windows 7 64 bit laptop! OK I only use it for DNG and JPG files but it works fine for me. When Microsoft acquired iView they changed it so that on Windows it no longer relied on QuickTime to do image rendering. You can understand the reasoning for this - relying on a rival, a bitter one at that, isn't ideal! Anyway they developed the WIC, Windows Imaging Component, which is something that the operating system understands. However for it to work it needs a Codec for each appropriate image type. A lot of the camera makers have been slow to release these and the quality has been extremely variable. One of the worst examples has been Adobe's one for DNG files. Olympus, needed for my ORF files, has also not been that great. Many have only released 32 bit versions, compounding the issue.

Anyway I found a piece of software called Fast Picture Viewer, which includes a comprehensive set of Codecs. The guy who has developed this knows his Windows inside out and it's an excellent piece of software. I now use it as my light table. Where iView and Expression Media took a couple of seconds to show a DNG file , extracting the full size JPG and displaying that, Fast Picture Viewer can do a couple of images per second. I can now review a 200 image shoot in 2-3 minutes, marking images I don't like accordingly. I suggest you look at this application. If you don't want / need the actual viewer application you can get just the Codecs. I've not compared image quality with any of the rival Codec suppliers but Fast Picture Viewer is a bargain as it's cheaper than the main competitor and you get all the Codecs rather than just a single one - you only install those that you actually require so I've installed the DNG and ORF ones and ignored the CR2 and NEF etc.

I assume it will work with MediaPro if they have built the application correctly. I tested the original release and found it too full of bugs and missing features and while these may have been resolved I've yet to install the new version and test it out on my laptop.